🎉1 Million Views in my Blog 🎉

When I started writing my blog, it was more of a personal notebook for what I considered important. The amount of information in the field has been exhausting for many years, and in the early stages of the blog, I thought that writing a blog could be an easy way to document the most important things. I must admit I was wrong, and it was not a silver bullet, but I still come back to my research occasionally.
 
Even though my focus has been on other community activities rather than writing blogs for the last four years, reaching 1 million views on the blog feels incredible. When looking back, the most active year in terms of contributions was 2020, when I published 28 posts, and the traffic on the site was booming! Since then, the pace and traffic have been quieter and going down, but I still occasionally write to the platform.

A Quick Look Back at the Journey

The blog has been there for approximately 10 years already. Half of the time, it has been very active, and half not so much, as can be seen in the number of yearly posts below. In the busiest years, I worked at Nixu and traveled actively between Helsinki and Stockholm. I remember that quite a lot of the research work turned into written words in the Stockholm Arlanda airport lounge :).

Content

It all started with Active Directory Domain Services aka Active Directory. “AD” has been close to my heart for my whole career, and I remember most of its configurations even though I’m not working with it daily, not even weekly. It’s also funny that the most views are on “Upgrading AD DS Schema to Windows Server 2016” post written in 2016. Since AD days, I wrote many posts about “Azure AD Connect”, the predecessor of Entra Connect during my time as a consultant helping customers to start leveraging cloud services. At those times, we did a vast amount of M365 migration cases.

Security Domain

In 2018, when I joined Nixu Corporation, I focused purely on security. Since then, all posts have been touching security stuff, focusing on the blue team side. Even though I’ve been working with the whole Microsoft security stack, between 2019-2021 I published approximately 30 posts about Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (MDA – former MCAS). For some reason, I was fortunate to have so many MDA cases on my table and that I was able to focus on it. Have to admit, that solution I know inside out 🙂

Today, I’ve written a total of 185 posts for the platform. It means multiple hours spent writing content that I think is meaningful for me and the community. Here is a summary of the stats:

Total Content: To date, I’ve published 185 posts in total

📅 Annually published posts:

  • 2025: 1 post
  • 2024: 5 posts
  • 2023: 7 posts
  • 2022: 16 posts
  • 2021:  20 posts
  • 2020: 28
  • 2019: 22
  • 2018: 19
  • 2017: 14
  • 2016: 20
  • 2015: 15
  • 2014: 3

🔥 All-Time Top Posts:

  1. Upgrading AD DS Schema to Windows Server 2016 – published October 6, 2016.
  2. Changing ADFS certificates – Service Communications (SSL) – published January 23, 2016.
  3. Azure AD Hybrid Device Join Error (0x801c03f2) – published January 9, 2020.

It’s funny to see your own post at the top of Bing/Google searches or as a reference in ChatGPT.

🔥Top posts from the past few years:

  1. Microsoft 365 Defender vs Azure Sentinel – Which one to use? – published November 24, 2020.
  2. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Web Content Filtering – Test Drive – published November 2, 2021.
  3. Azure AD Identity Protection Integrations with Microsoft Security Solutions – published November 22, 2022.
  4. Exposure Management Deep Dives – Part 1 & Part 2

Summary

Reaching 1 million views on the blog wouldn’t have been possible without an active Microsoft Security community. Thank you all for supporting me on this journey!

Stay tuned for more updates and deep insights about Microsoft security and technologies. As said, even though my focus has been on the ‘Entra ID Attack and Defense Playbook’ and other engagements than in my blog for the past years, there are still more to come to the blog as well! I’m currently working with one interesting engagement, stay tuned! 🌐🔐